Wider Genetic Affiliations of the Chinese Language
追溯汉语更远古的语源
John D. Bengtson
Abstract 摘要
The ancestry of the Chinese language is still a topic of vigorous debate. (See Wang, ed.,1995). In my own research, I find the immediate affiliation with Tibeto-Burman to be the most probable, i.e., that Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language. Beyond that horizon, I accept the more distant affiliation of Chinese (and Sino-Tibetan in general) with Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian: see Starostin, 1995). However, Dene-Caucasian properly consists of more language families than just Sino-Tibetan, Caucasian, and Yeniseian, the languages cited by Starostin. This paper brings in additional evidence from the other Dene-Caucasian languages, namely Basque, Burushaski, and Na-Dene. It will be shown that this supplemental evidence sheds additional light on the deep ancestry of the Chinese language.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 27 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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